Star Shot

by Mary-Ann Constantine

  Ah but you’re wrong. There’s quite a lot about ponds, ponds in space, falling out of the sky, it’s how he explains all those falls of little frogs and live fish, listen to this:

  We accept that there are bodies of water and also clear spaces – bottoms of ponds dropping out – very interesting ponds, having no earth at bottom…

  That there is water – oceans or lakes or ponds, or rivers of it – that there is water away from, and yet not far-remote from, this earth’s atmosphere and gravitation…

  The pain of it:

  A whole new science to learn:

  The Science of Super-Geography

  And all these things falling out of the sky, he says, is what causes star-jelly, star-rot, star-slubber, whatever you call it: it is the stuff brought down in meteor falls. Or so says Fort. Quite wrongly, obviously.

  Obviously, says Myra. What jelly?

  He finds a photo on his phone – it’s like it looks, gloopy, translucent stuff, sicked up by herons, I think. It doesn’t appear very often, but there was a lot of it about this year earlier on. I’ve got some people in the Natural History section of the museum working on it. Or possibly not. I think they’ve probably lost it. That’s why I was going in, he added, when I saw you that time.

  I don’t remember.

  No. You were very upset. You didn’t see me.

  There is a powerful silence from the bed. He looks at her sideways. You can’t get any paler, woman, he thinks. Stop it. Now.

  Something happened in there, didn’t it? What idiocy made him ask her that? He is braced for something sharp, something bitter, in response. But she just sounds genuinely puzzled.

  In where?

  In the museum. You were coming down the steps.

  Oh… I see. No. No. I don’t go in.

  What, never? He is astonished again.

  No. Why? Should I?

  I… well, No. I just thought you spent a lot of time there.

  I do. But not inside. And anyway, she adds suspiciously, how do you know I am there a lot?

  Theo shrugs, busy puzzling something out. A man called Luke. American. iPad.

  Is he a friend of yours?

  No. Not at all, I met him once.

  And you talked about me? Are you here because of him? Her eyes are dark smudges, she is weak and wild, and they are both trembling on the verge of not understanding each other at all. He gets suddenly to his feet, a baffled giant, and walks angrily two or three times around the foot of her bed. Then he stops and looks down at her, directly into her face.

  I am here, he says, because my mother is ill. The rest is coincidence. Believe that, or don’t believe it, as you wish; it isn’t important. What is important is that something happened to you in the…

  And it dawns on him.

  …no, on the steps of the museum, just outside, wasn’t it? Myra. Myra listen. I think I know what happened. Tell me. It was just outside, wasn’t it?

  She will not look at him looking at her, stares fiercely at the empty wall ahead.

  He will miss his train, he thinks. He doesn’t know if he can leave her. He is not angry now. Oh Myra, what is the matter with you? He reaches for his bag and the book, and puts his jacket on.

  I have to go, he says, more gently. But I’ll come back tomorrow, and I think, if you won’t tell me, that I can tell you what happened on the steps. But this is too much now. I’ll come back. Get some sleep.

  When she finally looks up at him her eyes are wet with tears.

  It doesn’t want me, she says.

  25.

  They set out again through the busy streets. He guides her a complicated route, picking out a path against the traffic and the people through the maze of silent threads. Sometimes he warns her when they are about to cross one, or briefly follow a trail; sometimes he doesn’t tell her, and watches to see how she reacts. Some seem to slip past her without making a mark, but others cause a ripple of concentration across her face. She turns to him for confirmation; he nods and shows her the map. They visit several of Luke’s benches, each caught in a noose of silence, their sitters vanished or moved on. She has put her phone away in her coat pocket and started using her hands to drop occasional comments into the air. A few of her phrases come back to him, half-remembered, he has forgotten the language, but her expressive face tells him most of what he needs to know. His own hands hover close in the air around her, and he guides her through town with the gentlest touch of her elbow, a brush of fingers on her coat.

  Outside the museum, though, he stops and begins to text again. He tells her about the thick wall of silence wrapped like a huge snake around the building; his team, he says, have been monitoring it. He finds a recent report in his emails and hands her the phone for her to read it: it is putting the public off, they think, even though most of them don’t notice it; it seems to be turning them away at some subconscious level, you can see them on the steps hovering about and changing their minds. The museum authorities are very concerned about the effect on footfall, especially with the Easter holidays coming up. Staff, says the report, are demoralised; a lot are phoning in sick.

  She nods and hands back the phone. Stands with her hands deep in the pockets of her big coat and looks at the building critically for a few moments, before making her way very slowly up the steps. He stands on the red tarmac, watching her.

  She halts two or three steps from the top and puts a hand on the railing, as if to steady herself, stays very still for a few seconds and then turns and heads back down to the road with a cold, sour look on her face. She shakes her head as if to throw off an unpleasantness, and her eyes tell him she doesn’t know what is going on. He smiles and takes one of her cold hands between both of his and lifts it briefly to his lips. None of us know, he says. It’s unsettling us all.

  Strong enough for the castle? It’s nearly half past.

  She nods.

  They ignore the sideways underpass and head decisively straight ahead. And then stand, foolishly, as people always do, balanced on the knobbly kerb of the A470 waiting for the sudden inrush of traffic in both directions to abate. She texts him as they stand.

  How did you get the castle to open?!

  Sold my soul.

  You haven’t got one.

  They don’t know that.

  No really how?

  Really. Have to do weekend shooting pheasants in Scotland.

  Christ in heaven… Shoot to miss!

  Will do… The pheasants, anyway.

  When they look up again they see they have missed the lull: cars and buses roar past in opposing streams, impossible. He grabs her arm and points back to the underpass, and they set off, half-running, laughing, their hands colliding softly, then pulling away.

  A man in a dark-blue uniform is waiting for them outside the castle. They apologise for being a little late, and show their identity cards. That’s all right, sir, says the man, looking at them both. But I’m afraid I do have to lock up at six.

  That’s fine, says the professor, I don’t think we’ll need long.

  The uniformed man pulls an electronic key-card from his breast pocket, and the small wooden door cut into the huge oak door of the entrance swings open.

  There you are, sir, he says. All yours. The grounds, that is: you know the buildings are locked up?

  Yes, they told me. We just need a quick look at the grounds this time. Thank you.

  I’ll be waiting out here, says the man. I’ll call at five to, if you’re not done by then.

  Fine, says the professor, and steps through the doorway with Meg.

  It is the first time he has been inside since the Norman keep was removed piece by carefully labelled piece and despatched to America, over a decade ago, to pay for a new wing on the hospital; he is shocked by the flattened, grassed-over space and the damp ditch of the moat, sitting in the huge empty green square inside the walls. They feel the sudden drop in temperature and look at each other. He raises his eyebrows and gestures that they should walk round the o
uter gravel path, past dilapidated buildings where he remembers a café and a gift shop: wooden swords, plastic helmets. She slips her hand into his and they walk together, quiet and concentrating, and climb the grassy bank to the walls and walk along the top looking down. It feels easier to breathe up there.

  They come down again to the level, where Meg gently pulls him to a halt.

  Just me now, she says with her hands. He nods and lets her go, but he is tight with anxiety. The place is awash with silence, so thick he can feel it in his lungs. He keeps his eyes fixed on her, the strongest, the fiercest person he knows, walking across the grass towards the centre of the green space, towards the emptied moat which had once protected the vanished keep. Where he and his brother had climbed like wicked goats. His frightened mother.

  She slows down by the wooden bridge that crosses the moat. And begins to talk with her hands. Not to him, he’s pretty sure of that. Phrases flash out at him like glimpses of light, like birds too quick for him to identify; this is complex, agitated language. He can’t see her face, but can sense her distress. He is half-aware of time passing too quickly; they must only have a few minutes left. He watches from the foot of the bank with growing concern, urgently waiting for a sign that he can move again.

  At last she turns. She has raised her hands to her ears as if to shut out a terrible noise. Like that bloody Munch painting, he thinks, as he sets off quickly across the grass towards her. And then she sways, and he breaks into a run, and catches her, and pulls her into him and holds her very tight. Dere, he says, dere nawr. They make for the open door. It seems miles. And the word in his head, over and over, is his mother’s: annifyr.

  26.

  Dan has just sat down on Myra’s bench, as an experiment. Teddy is making his way round the circular flowerbed with the standing stones, stopping to examine things, talking to himself.

  No! says Dan. Dim yn dy geg! Don’t put it in your mouth… And for once, he doesn’t.

  Then suddenly there is Theo looming over him, looking faintly shocked.

  Hello, says Dan – are you on your way in or out?

  Neither, says Theo. I came to sit here a moment. He doesn’t say why, doesn’t say that her bed is empty and that she has disappeared.

  Then sit. You’ll find it’s cold.

  After a minute or so they look at each other and get up. Dan suggests following Teddy round the flowerbed, so they pace round the stones, past dark budding tulips and brash primulas, and talk. Dan tells him about the emptying benches, the people vanishing. At least we know where she is, he says, gesturing to the bench. Have you seen her?

  Theo nods, noncommittally.

  Is she OK?

  I don’t know.

  Do you think they’ll all end up in hospital, then?

  Doesn’t seem terribly likely does it? No. I expect the cold feeling just moves them on.

  Dan tells him that Luke says they have a plan, at the department, that the professor has an idea for some Arts Intervention scheme, dancing or something, to try and tackle it.

  Theo looks sceptical. They tried all that stuff years ago, in the depression, you remember? Or perhaps you’re too young. People dancing and reading all over the place, you couldn’t move for performances.

  Teddy has to be restrained from biting the head off a tulip.

  Not too young. Think I probably performed with the best of them; I expect I was excruciating. But I don’t think we did any harm.

  Hmm. Well it didn’t exactly work, did it?

  Maybe not, maybe a bit.

  They watch a dog and its owner manoeuvre nervously past the child.

  What do you do for a living? asks Dan.

  Theo explains about the organisation, the official part of it at least, and tells him about the nature reserve and the pool and the wetlands. We do a lot of conservation stuff with schools, he says. Kids can come out, help plant trees, catalogue wildlife. We get some public money to do that, and then there are private projects, ponds, mini-reserves, landscaping. And we salve bad consciences: companies, individuals. Planting trees is like saying hail-marys, only more productive.

  Are you a big team, then? asks Dan.

  Never enough of us, says Theo. And since my mother broke her hip I’ve let far too much go. I can’t concentrate. It’s pretty hard staying on top of everything at the moment.

  It must be.

  He doesn’t say it, but he thinks in a vague unformed way that he would be glad to feel like that, to have too much to do, the urgency of it. Not that he hasn’t got too much to do with the house and Teddy, but to have other people waiting for you, needing you to do things for them, that must not be a bad thing. A public sphere. When all the benches are empty, he thinks, I’ll be no use to anyone except Teddy, who is a different kind of sphere, the whole round world, the whole wide universe, the Alpha and Omega. Little bugger that he is.

  He removes another piece of tulip from the child’s mouth. Finds a dinosaur in his pocket and offers him that instead.

  How about you? says Theo, sensing something in Dan’s pause.

  Work? No. Not at the moment. It’s all him.

  You’re on your own, aren’t you? Theo tries to remember the conversation on the steps.

  Yes. Yes, it’s nearly two years since his mother died.

  Ah. That’s difficult.

  But before that I was in literature, a researcher. And she was an astrophysicist.

  Oh yes, I remember, I saw you in there by the meteors.

  They walked round again.

  But I’ll need to do something soon, says Dan. We’re barely managing, and they’ll stop all the benefits when he turns two unless I register for work.

  Teddy falls over and howls. Dan picks him up and fetches wipes from the buggy, cleans the grazed hand. He sets him down again with a kiss. You stink, he says. We’ll have to go back in there and change you.

  What will you do? asks Theo. Will you try the University again?

  No, I’ve been too long out of the system, and I didn’t finish my project because Jane got ill. They don’t fund failures. And anyway I couldn’t do it any more; it’s ended. Not me.

  So what would you like to do?

  He sounds genuinely interested, thinks Dan, with a small rush of gratitude. He smiles and shrugs, and holds his hands up in front of him.

  Use these, he says. The head is fucked. The rest of me is tired, but recoverable, probably.

  Come and spend a day with us, then, says Theo. See what you think. We need hands.

  27.

  Hunkered down at the edge of the pond he lets the water run through his fingers and examines the wriggling larvae in the clay and silt left in the palm of his big hand. Life enough there. He transfers the clay to the small tank beside him, and scoops up another handful; same again but different. A little fish is trapped in the mud this time, and he washes it free. He looks up with a grin as a scud of starlings fling themselves like some kind of self-conscious magic trick across the pond and off into the far line of trees. They break his concentration, so he gets up and stretches his aching knee, and wonders what next. He should go inside and make something to eat, he is getting cold, and his jeans are wet from kneeling. But he is still too restless to go in; he needs to walk, he decides, up the hill, a proper fierce walk that will erase the nightmarish quality of the day’s walking in the white corridors.

  He had gone back the following day, unable to sleep for concern; her pinched unhappy face, those tears. He’d gone back to tell her about the network of silence, to try and understand her distress a little more. The curtains had been drawn around the bed when he arrived, and he had spent a patient hour reading to his mother, and answering questions, as best he could, on behalf of his dead but increasingly present younger brother. And when he had finished, and gone back to Myra’s part of the ward, the curtains had still been drawn. On the train home he had cancelled the following morning’s meetings and laboriously reorganised a pond-drop all for nothing. The bed, the following day, was c
lean and empty. No sign of her things. No sign of her.

  He asked the nurses on the ward, none of whom he recognised. No one seemed to know what had happened to Myra, and more urgent things were happening to other people, and even the sympathetic ones could not stay to help. Back down at reception, after a painful wait, he had spoken to someone behind a desk with a huge computer screen. Myra Jones. Admitted about a fortnight, three weeks, ago. Has she been discharged? They were experiencing technical problems, said the woman. Serious problems, affecting their data. From what she could see they had no record of anybody with that name, but she couldn’t give a definitive answer, given the chaos. Come back later.

  So he had walked white corridors, all of them too much alike, level upon level, and scanned all the wards he could get into with a cold fear growing inside him. He had left the building defeated and angry, but certain that she was still in it. Which hadn’t stopped him helplessly making the detour to her bench, just in case.

  He is starving. The need for food is making him shake. He has worked hard, thinking, to keep her white face at bay, of Dan in the park, wondering what on earth they will do with Teddy, if he comes. He wants tea and toast, and his mother’s marmalade; probably the last she will ever make now, the kitchen full of its citrus smell and the glorious array of jars just days before her fall. It should be hoarded like dragon gold; but today he needs its warmth. He should go in and light the fire now; the sun is going down behind the hill.

  But he sets off instead for the far line of trees on the ridge, where the starlings were headed, walking hard and fast. Past the brave damson with its white stars. His hand in his jacket pocket finds a metal ring, the silver twisted bracelet. There was no story attached, it transpired. She had looked at it quite blankly, and reached out for the river pearls instead, running them with pleasure from hand to hand and talking in the mildly scolding tone of voice she kept for his father; he had a job on his hands, these days, representing so many ghosts. So he could do what he liked with it, he thinks, reaching the foot of the hill, and the grove of slightly older trees, the three, four, five year olds: stronger, taller, harder to transplant, but that much more of a triumph when it works. And more expensive for the sinners, of course; more hail-marys for your money.